Monday, 25 April 2016

Eating For Animal's Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale for Save A Cow at The Green Edge

Wow, what a mouthful of a post title! Yesterday I held my fourth Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale. I organised it through the vegan food group I founded, Eating For Animals, and this year we were raising money for the wonderful Save A Cow. We ended up having a super lovely day. While it didn't reach the crazed crowds of the ALQ bake sale I organised in February, we had a steady stream of customers and we closed up an hour early because pretty much everything was gone. Once again, we held it at The Green Edge, who kindly made the space available to us as well as making a generous donation to the cause.

As per usual, because I love to live on the edge, I made a bunch of things that I had never made before for the bake sale, as well as my trusty Berry Patch Brownies and gluten-free Soulhaus Cookies.

Coconut Cornmeal Cupcakes with Lemon Icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero and The New Vegan by Aine Carlin: These were one of my gluten-free offerings. I used the gluten freedom vanilla cupcake recipe from VCTOTW as my base, using coconut milk instead of soy milk and adding coconut extract. I used cornmeal, but it was a bit grittier than the one they probably use. These cupcakes generally are pretty dense even without the cornmeal. The flavour was definitely good. I think I prefer the chocolate GF cupcake recipe in this book to the vanilla. I iced them with the lemon icing recipe from The New Vegan.
Rating: :)

Orange Vanilla Dream Bars from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur by Kelly Peloza: The base for these bars is quite thick, and ended up a little on the crunchy side because I needed to bake it a bit extra to get it to go golden, but it was a lovely orange dessert when paired with the icing (which set up perfectly). The orange flavour comes from a mix of orange juice and orange marmalade. I blitzed my marmalade in a food processor first because it had a lot of big chunks of peel in it. Very nice!
Rating: :)

Mint Cookies 'n' Cream Cupcakes from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: I find that Chloe's cupcakes tend to bake up quite big. This recipe made 16, but you could get an extra one or two out of it if you filled them a little less and they would still acceptable cupcake size. This recipe calls for crushed chocolate sandwich cookies (I used Oreos) in both the batter and the icing. I used my food processor, so they ended up more ground than crushed, and my icing turned out a fair bit darker compared to the photo in the book. All the mint in this recipe comes from the peppermint extract in the frosting, which adds a nice and refreshing note. A note for decorating - I iced the cupcakes the day before the bake sale and had them in the fridge overnight, then garnished them the morning of so that the cookies wouldn't go soggy. The icing gets super firm, so ideally leave them out of the fridge for a bit to warm up or it will crack a bit!
Rating: :)

Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcakes with Maple Frosting from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: If you are looking for these cupcakes in the book, you won't find them. The actual recipe is Cinnamon Mocha Cupcakes... but I really don't like coffee. So I changed it. In the batter, I left out the the espresso powder and doubled the cinnamon. For the icing, I used some leftover plain icing out of the freezer (probably about 1/3 to 1/2 of a regular batch of her icing) than I beat up with some more icing sugar to firm it a bit more and also some maple extract instead of the espresso powder in water. The result was amazing! Definitely my favourite of all the things I made for this sale. Who needs coffee? Try it this way!
Rating: :D

Butterscotch Apple Cookies from Quick-Fix Vegan by Robin Robertson: I made these to use up some more of my butterscotch chip haul. The dough is a bit funny. You beat butter and other liquid ingredients together, then beat in the flour, then stir in the chips and the apple. It ended up having a very gummy feel to it. These cookies also didn't spread at all, so I smooshed them down on the bake tray. They were meant to be golden brown in 10-12 minutes, but I had to bake for more like 20. I got two dozen cookies using an Australian TBS as a scoop. Despite being a bit funny to make, I ended up loving these. Mostly because of the apple and cinnamon flavours, the butterscotch wasn't too sweet. I didn't sift icing sugar over them as the recipe instructed, because that would have just been messy to take to a bake sale.
Rating: :D

Vegan Anzac Biscuits from Suzy Spoon's Vegetarian Butcher by Suzy Spoon: My mum actually made these as a contribution. She made them while I was away, and froze them until the sale. Given that the bake sale was the day before ANZAC day (which is today, the 25th), it seemed fitting to have some there. The biscuits had the classic flavour, but were quite soft. I like crispy Anzac biscuits. I wasn't sure if that was because of them being frozen, but mum said that they never went crispy even when fresh (the recipe says they will crisp up as they cook).
Rating: :)

Chickpea Blondies from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman: Everyone's heard of black bean brownies, but how about chickpea blondies? I must admit I was intrigued to add these to my gluten-free offerings. Chickpeas, sugar, peanut butter, strawberry jam and a few other ingredients made a very dense, fudgy blondie (the only flour in it is a smidge of brown rice flour) that was delightfully not too sweet.
Rating: :)

Double Chocolate Macadamia Cookies: This made a lot of cookies (I got 50 using an Australian sized TBS as my scoop), which was good because I was able to take some to a baby shower last week and some to the bake sale yesterday. I have no patience for actually chopping macadamias, so I just crushed them with my nut mallet. These are sweet and chocolatey.
Rating: :)

So they are the new things I made. Let's see what else is on the table! My co-bakers with EFA are Marion and Lisa, and they also baked some lovely yummies.

Gluten-Free Coconut Ice by Marion.

Gluten-Free Soulhaus Cookies by me (from Great Gluten Free Vegan Eats by Allyson Kramer). I make these every bake sale.

And Marion made these adorable Save A Cow cupcakes! How cute are they?

A shot of the table! We ended up raising $782 for Save A Cow, which was a fantastic outcome!

I was pretty hungry by the time we finished, but also pretty keen to get home, so I ordered a burger to takeaway. I got their special, a pulled BBQ jackfruit burger with kale slaw. When I got home I realised that instead of kale slaw on the burger, there was lettuce, so I guess they were out of slaw. But it was still really good. The jackfruit was delicious! And it had tomato and avocado and mayo on it. The best jackfruit burger I've had, I think.

I think it is good to put out the numbers. I am always curious to see how successful different sales are, which charities/locations/baked goods get the best turn out. I think it is helpful for planning future bake sales as well.

Ooooh, what a fun bake sale!!! Your berry patch brownies sound amazing right now (and I'm typically not a brownie eater). And I want ALL THE COOKIES! Seriously, it's a good thing I brought dessert to work today cause I'm gonna need it now! We haven't held our bake sale here in a couple years because I've been lazy and haven't felt like organizing. Next year, I need to bring it back!

What a great thing you did! It must have been a ton of work to organize this and you did it for such a great cause =)How long did it take you to make all of those goodies? Wow! You are amazing. I would love to have a baking day with you ;)The Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcakes with Maple Frosting look especially good as do the pb cup caramel brownie cupcakes. The Save a Cow cupcakes are adorable!Congrats on such a successful event =)

I actually work out a system of what I can bake in advance and freeze (cookies, slices, unfrosted cupcakes). It works really well and they defrost nice and fresh! But still there is normally two solid days of baking and decorating right before the bake sale. I have it down to a bit of a science. Also important is playing lots of loud Taylor Swift or Kylie, allowing for an occasional sob, and not sitting down until you are done for the day because once you sit, it is all over. ;)

Lover of Kittens and Kitchens

I have two great loves in my life. Firstly are the wonderful beings that are kitty cats. Second is vegan cooking in all its forms. So don't freak out if you find a stray cat hair settled into your cupcake.
I am a cat vet and I am also lucky enough to share my life with my fabulous girls - Dim Sim (small and black) and Sahara (cinnamon Abyssinian). Also my angel cat Gizmo, who may have left us but is never forgotten. I've been a vegan since September 2000, and haven't looked back since! I don't really make my own recipes, what I do like to do is make other people's recipes (I have shelves of vegan cookbooks) or eat out, take photographs and then share the results.